Yeah. Celebs are “twittering.” Makes the bile rise at the back of your throat a bit. But really a useless, pandering bit of online copy – rather tell us who is doing it well (I’m looking at you Hammer. I kid you not, he’s on his game.) And does it matter? And what stars is it working for? Blah blah and so on. In the twilight of the republic I see the NYTs is now just a boot black for US Weekly.

A brief nota bene from the clever kids over at Ars Technica. Does Twitter of any tech tool really matter more than ideas? Probably not. But interesting to note how Twitter continues to be the flavor of the moment.

Thoughtful post via Mashable. Not sure I agree with the idea of banning brands – think it’s probably a case by case thing. But…do agree that forcing brands to put a human face on their Twitter interaction would better serve them in the long run.

With literally thousands of social net like objects proliferating who has the bandwidth to dip into a single one for more than a few minutes a day. Better yet, why should I spend my time sharing photos of my vacation in Puerto Rico when I could be sharing pet tips over at Fuzzster? The big hands are betting heavily right now on widget power as the real driver of attention and engagement. Two of the biggies, investment firms, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, paid $50 million for a 9.1% stake in Slide, a San Francisco- based company best known as the purveyor of entertainments like SuperPoke, which lets Facebook users “ninja kick” or “bodyslam” or “throw a pillow at” their friend Got that? The community is not about sharing fond memories with college buddies…it’s where’s that thingy that lets me throw virtual dog poop at them. Slide CEO Max Levchin dishes in a recent Fortune article about the power of widgets (that $50million stake implies a valuation of half a billion btw). “The metrics for success,” says Levchin, “are going to shift away from who can provide the most reach toward who is paid the most attention.”

We here at Black Match have long been citizens of the virtual universe, now it seems the rest of the marketing world is catching on. Whether it’s working within a pre-existing universe like Second Life or creating a custom universe like MTV’s Laguna Beach, what’s hot at the moment is virtuality. Second Life is up to 400,000 users and counting – exchanging real money – and savvy media properties are angling for awareness among this concentrated but highly influential population. Look no further than this New York Times article for a quick bit of insight on how some very youth oriented properties like MTV are pushing the envelope.

“At MTV, reality has always been a moving target. Sixteen years ago, the network heralded the era of reality television with “The Real World.” Three years ago, it pushed the genre further with “Laguna Beach: The Real OC,” in which the mundane lives of a clique of pretty teenagers were presented in a way that appeared scripted and dramatic.

Now the cable channel aims to push the boundaries of false reality one step further. This week, MTV will introduce Virtual Laguna Beach, an online service in which fans of the program can immerse themselves — or at least can immerse digitized, three-dimensional characters, called avatars, that they control — in virtual versions of the show’s familiar seaside hangouts(see article).”

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